poem: alana hayes
(a not so ode-like) ode to my stretchmarks
This is an ode to my stretch marks.
Tiger Stripes, Tiger Thighs,
I try to think of fierce names for you.
Something to counteract the insecurity I feel
when I look down.
You know stretch marks occur for a lot of reasons:
growth spurts, weight gain,
pregnancy, depression, genetics,
the list continues...
They are a scar that forms within a layer of your skin
when it is stretched faster than it can grow.
You, Lightning Legs, were caused by rapid weight gain
as a symptom of my depression.
You are an accumulation of all the days I gave up
and didn’t get out of bed,
and all the other days
when I ate to fill the empty spaces, the empty time.
I cried the night I noticed just how present you had become at my little party.
You were just another thing that helped turn sleep into a stranger.
But I’ve started to realize that you, dear skin, are just a record of my life,
like the rings in a tree trunk, and you, my thighs,
all thunder and lighting,
are just one of the many rings I will accumulate throughout my life.
A marker of a time that I will move forward from.
The truth is, you aren’t objectively ugly.
You’re just lines on skin. Right now, the color red. So new.
You’re the color of lipstick, sriracha sauce, the check marks
your teacher puts on the front of your paper
right next to the A+.
Underlined, circled, written
in red.
And none of these things are ugly. They just are.
It’s just when you’re grading skin
people tend to tell us it has to look a certain way,
or it can’t be beautiful.
I guess that’s why I cried.
I felt like some of my beauty died the day you moved in.
I guess that’s why I like to keep you covered
because, if reality is perception,
then, if people can’t see you,
maybe in someone's version of the world
you don’t exist.
But the thing I’ve come to realize is,
that skin, like everything stretched beyond it’s limits,
has to break before you can begin the process of repair.
If we don’t break, we don’t heal,
we don’t change.
This is something my skin and I are figuring out how to deal with
at the same time.
We may never heal as quickly, or as perfectly as I want us to,
but we are learning the art of adaptability, together.
Coming to terms with the fact that healing isn’t a perfect practice,
that we will scar,
and that will have to be okay
because, from this point on, my skin and I will never be the same.
We can’t rewind,
un-break, un-heal, un-scar.
We are changed irrevocably.
Maybe this was my skin’s way of letting me know that, whether I feel it or not,
nothing about me is actually stuck, or stagnant.
I’m still growing.
Trying to take up enough space to make the world take notice.
That breaking may feel ugly, at first,
but that doesn’t mean it can’t lead me somewhere beautiful.
That part of life is the scars we collect. The ones you can see, and the ones you can’t.
That the things we battle with, and overcome, make us more interesting.
That the marks they leave behind are just the chapter titles of our stories.
Or, maybe, my skin isn’t teaching me this.
This may just be something I’m trying to teach myself.
It’s the bridge I’m building across my skin,
so that one day I can look down, brush my hands across the surface,
and not feel like I am something that I ruined.
And this isn’t just an ode to my scars, it’s an ode to me,
a reminder, to myself, that you are not
too late,
too broken,
too fat,
too ugly,
too messed up,
too ruined,
to come back from this.
You are something I am putting back together myself,
one day at a time,
and because you didn’t come with an instruction manual,
and I have no idea what I’m doing,
we will scar
Beautifully.
about the author: alana hayes
you can learn more about alana hayes here.
